Lustige Zeichnung

Bizarro is brought to you today by Inspirational Art.

If you're as big a fan of ruthless dictator emoticons as I am, you'll love this cartoon. It features a Hitler emoticon. Actually, I've never seen a Hitler emoticon before my friend and partner, Wayno, sent this gag idea to me. To hear him tell it, his wife thought up the emoticon and he figured out a way to make a joke out of it. Then I drew it. I'm the blue-collar in this equation. Here's Wayno's story about it, which, if it differs from mine at all is just him lying again.

Speaking of attempted genocide, let's take a cartoon visit to The South. Somebody wrote to me and said that in Mississippi, people don't say "y'all." I admit I've never been to Mississippi, but I was raised in The South and have traveled a bit there and have never come across a state where they didn't say it, so I'm going with my original premise. If you've ever lived in Mississippi, let me know the truth. History demands it.

I'm off to wrestle with the tedious details of my job as the greatest cartoonist currently living in my building. Aufwiedersehen, y'all.

Want these cartoons on fine products of a wide assortment? Click below...
Hitler Emoticon
Y'all Turn

.

Tsar Stars

Bizarro is brought to you today by Tsars.

I've been away from the blog for a few days, I hope you missed me. I missed you in a way that can only be described as "sort of, in an abstract way."

The reason I've been missing this week was because my good friend and colleague, Wayno, was visiting from his hometown of Chugfuggit, Tennessee. We worked together, ate together, drank together, showered together (but in different bathrooms) for three days and right about now he's back in his cabin in the hills and his wife is trying to get the cigar smell out of his clothing. Hahaha. Good luck, Tiffany Chrystal.

I think most people these days spell the word, "czar," but "tsar" is perfectly acceptable and maybe older. I don't really know, but it worked better for this gag because it is a rearrangement of the word "star". I like a reality show where the losers are killed onstage. That's how I roll.

The "seeing-eye man" is a fun gag about a blind dog. Some dogs are actually blind, I used to have one myself, so I'm surprised I didn't get some hate mail from readers who found it insensitive. I have gotten a fair amount of hate mail in the past few days over a couple of other comics, which I will be sharing with you in a post in the very near future.

I got no hate mail about this last cartoon, either. I guess nobody feels sorry for museum busts, like this one of Michael Jackson. That, in itself, makes me feel sorry for them and now I'm sorry I ever did this cartoon. My sincere apologies to any and all busts who read Bizarro. I have betrayed you and I regret it. Please excuse my poor judgment, it won't happen again.

More tomorrow. We've been dumped on by a few thousand tons of snow here in Brooklyn, again. Bizarro International Headquarters is still digging its way out.

To find many fine products with these cartoons on them, just click the cartoon!

.

Dancing

I am a huge fan of Tom the Dancing Bug and no fan of political correctness, so it seems fitting that I share this week's brilliant TDB with you. Click the image for greater enlargingmentation.

To read the TDB blog, click the offensive word in this sentence: Sometimes I enjoy a cracker with my soup.

Four for Fun

Bizarro is brought to you today by Ghostbusters, 33 A.D.

What are your plans for New Year's Eve? My plans include food, drink and my sofa. Leaving the house on NYE in NYC is as attractive to me as trying to tie a bonnet on the head of a wild gorilla. It might make for some good pictures but it isn't worth the risk.

Here are four cartoons from last week's Bizarros as they appeared in newspapers. I got a few emails from readers who enjoyed the "outside the box" gag, but none from anyone who objected to it. When I do funeral gags, I often get mail from someone who had recently attended a funeral and that consequently found my cartoon a painful reminder. I sympathize, but dark humor always carries that risk and I believe that laughing at tragedy is a valuable part of the human psyche, so I soldier on.

My editors and I worried that I might get some negative feedback from the "Family Outing" cartoon, especially since it ran right before Christmas. Most of my readers enjoy this kind of irreverence but some are offended by anything that might cause them to have to explain something to their children that they find uncomfortable. (If you are one of these kinds of parents, drop me an email, I'd be happy to tell you how to deal with these things. The technique is called "The Simple Truth," and you'd be surprised how easy it is and how well it works.)

Still others are only sensitive about controversial issues during holidays, which mystifies me beyond my comprehension. I could go crazy trying to predict all of those points of view so I just print the ones I think are funny when I think of them and put on my comedy helmet to deflect the potential poo storm.

"Check/Background Check" is a dating gag. Nothing new to report about this one except that it is a good idea to run a background check on anyone you intend to date more than once. Especially my cousin Keith, who is a complete tool and will destroy your credit, ladies.

My "Gettysburg Tweet" cartoon got lots of positive response and I am grateful, for I, too, really like it. One reader told me I got the quote wrong, however. Apparently the correct verbage is "fathers," not "forefathers." Before I drew this one, I looked it up to get it right but then threw "forefathers" into it somehow. Maybe my brain was regurgitating part of one of the Tea Baggers favorite catch phrases. Or maybe I just slept through my 7th grade history classes too often. At the time, I couldn't imagine why a big famous rock star was going to need that info so I just blew it off.

Let this be a lesson to you kids in school: you'll probably never succeed at anything, certainly not at what you think you will, so study hard in school so you won't be both a failure and an idiot. You'll thank me later for this advice.

Until next time, enjoy your day, study hard, and if you learn nothing else in this life, learn to recognize sarcasm.


.

Holiday Message

For those of you who care about this sort of thing, here is a link to an essay by comedian, Ricky Gervais, about his reasons for being atheist and how he deals with it in a world that is predominately hostile towards his lack of belief. His views also happen to be mine.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/19/a-holiday-message-from-ricky-gervais-why-im-an-atheist/

Not My Leak

WTF? First, I am accused of throwing a cable guy off my roof (see yesterday's post) now the WikiLeaking thing. The spelling is different, though.

(click pic to enlarge)


.

Kryptonite Bulb Seuss

Bizarro is brought to you today by TONIGHT!

Wow, what a super bonus fun pack I have for you today! Our first illustration is an old header panel that I found in the archives. These things appear on the left side of my Sunday comic in some papers, so most people never get to see them. I also used this character (Psychic Salmon) on my website for a goofy fortune-telling page. Check it out here.

Now let's talk about this groovy Superman cartoon. I love it. The self-congratulatory nerd who has overcome Superman with his 99 cent phone app makes me laugh. And laughing is good. At the comedy gig I did last night I met an actress who is starring in the strange, controversial horror film, The Human Centipede, and has therefore been called upon to go to fantasy and comic conventions to publicize it. Some of her fans are even creepier than the movie.

This Edison cartoon garnered an email from a reader who said that Edison did not invent the light bulb, Tesla did. I know that Tesla was a genius on Edison's level, perhaps beyond, worked for Edison for a time and invented some things that Edison not only took credit for but never paid for, then went on to an illustrious career of his own. But I'm not sure the light bulb was one of those things. The electric motor that we still use all over the world today was Tesla's, that's all I can say for sure. If I had the stamina and motivation to look it up on Wikipedia, I could probably find the answer but it is Saturday morning and I'm feeling lazy. Either way, it's a cartoon not a history lesson, so Edison works for my purposes.

Lastly, is this odd Sunday cartoon from 2000, wherein I parody Seuss. I've been a huge fan of Dr. Seuss since I was learning to read and had a blast concocting this poem and drawing the characters. I thought you might enjoy having a look. If I was wrong, please don't say anything. It might hurt my feelings.

Have a weekend of grandeur, my friends.

What Came Before

I wanted to share this interesting video by a brilliant animator, Nina Paley. This is part of a series of work she is doing to help reframe the debate about copyright issues. This short film has a lot to say about religion and other forms of human creativity.

Dog Judge Voyeur

Bizarro is brought to you today by Jailer's School.

I got some interesting mail on the dog cartoon. A handful of people wrote to me and said how much they liked this cartoon, two of whom were professional cartoonists. This surprised me a bit, I didn't think it was all that clever, just sort of a funny visual. One site, The Comics Curmudgeon, one of my favorite daily reads and one that makes its bread by skewering cartoons, posted it just because they liked it. I secretly always wanted to be on that site but not for the eviscerating reasons that cartoons usually end up there. It was a dream come true.

Even more surprising was an email from someone who normally loves my work but hated this one because it was "cruel." Perhaps they did not realize it is only a cartoon man, no "real" people got hurt.

This brings us to Casual Friday. I've never worked in an office with a dress code and have always pitied those who do. It's particularly ridiculous when you have to wear something completely outside the norm, like a choir robe. Would people show less respect for someone in a suit? The British really go to town with this tradition, dressing their judges up like old women. Even their lawyers (which they have another name for; "chips" is it?) have to wear wigs and doilies. Try as I might, I cannot understand this kind of behaviour. (spelled the British way.) For consistency's sake, they should also make the defendants dress up in costumes. Perhaps something more amusing to break up all that black and grey. I'd like to suggest a duck costume since if things don't go well, they may be going "up the river."

Today's ancient offering is about history, science, voyeurism and religion. Here in NYC, people regularly spy on each other with binoculars and telescopes. It's just a given when so many of us live so closely together in high-rise buildings. You get used to it and don't think anything about it after a while. When I first came to NYC, my future wife, CHNW, used to routinely walk around her apartment at night in various stages of undress. I asked her why she didn't close her blinds and she said, quite innocently, "What's the point? The only thing across the street is a rectory full of priests." (Not to be confused with a rectum full...)

I shudder to think how many crises of faith she instigated as those poor souls struggled to maintain their commitment to celibacy. Except for the gay or pedophile ones, of course.

.

Money Ass Hat

Bizarro is brought to you today by Missing Relief.

Gosh, I've missed you. I meant to post some cartoons yesterday but got swept up into the UFO of responsibility and was anally probed late into the night. But here I am today, perched on a foam rubber doughnut.

If anyone enjoys meaningless historical research, see if you can find out where the cliche bag full of money with a dollar sign on the outside came from. I'm guessing it was invented for a cartoon of some sort, but you never know. Perhaps it was a standard in vaudeville or maybe banks really did put money in those kind of bags to keep them from being confused with laundry.

I also wonder if anyone has ever shown up to rob a bank and forgotten to bring anything to put the money in. What if the teller runs all over the place and can't find anything appropriate? Meanwhile, the robber waits at the window threatening to shoot him/her but knows that's not going to speed up the process. Then the police arrive and the forgetful robber is busted. Another great reason to bring your canvas shopping bags with you each time you leave the house, folks.

This big hat cartoon makes me smile, but I'm afraid the sign is a little confusing. I meant for it be say that backpacks as well as hats larger than 10 gallons are to be checked at the door, but you could read it to mean that backpacks larger than ten gallons as well as hats larger than ten gallons... which is screwy. Oh well, no point in over thinking it now.

Today's offering from the Cartoon Time Machine is an old favorite of a number of readers – presumably those who do not like their boss. It's always fun to find a way to make a point that would otherwise be rejected by newspaper editors; in this case calling the boss a horse's ass.

More tomorrow, or, if the UFO comes back, on Saturday.


.

The Flood

Bizarro is brought to you today by Human Ingenuity.

Every thinking person has considered at one time or another how the world will end. By "the world" we always mean humanity, of course, as if the entire existence of the planet were about us. It is a common religious tenet that the world was created for humans but this self-centered idea is one that I believe to be born of ignorance and superstition.

I was indoctrinated with this concept, too, and believed it for most of my life; it's difficult to let go of things ingrained in us when we are very young. But acquainting myself with the body of knowledge about the earth and the universe that humans have gathered with our nimble brains over the past several thousand years, it became increasingly obvious that nothing could be further from the truth. We are but passengers on a ship along with millions of other species of plants and animals, all of which balance rather delicately upon each other.

There is also human arrogance in the idea that we will end it all with some amazing invention like the atomic bomb – killed by our own awesomely ingenious amazingness. Oh, the tragic drama of it all. In fact, it looks as though the end of us will be at the hands of a leaky pipe.

As T. S. Eliot said, "Not with a bang but a whimper."

Humor Formula

Bizarro is brought to you today by Invaders.

If there is one thing I've learned in my bazillion years as a syndicated cartoonist it is that there are lots of people who don't get any given cartoon. Especially if it has a history reference in it.

For those folks, the British Invasion is the name given to the many British rock bands in the late sixties that were so very popular in the United States. The term was a play on words in reference to the British invasion of the colonies during the American Revolutionary War. The War of 1812 would be another famous example of the British invading something.

Today's cartoon formula: Old guy still dressing like a mod from the sixties attempts to hit on young woman by making an outdated reference and she shoots him down with history. Who said that stuff we learned in school wouldn't come in handy some day?

Knowledge is Power

I just found these two videos this morning and they are truly amazing.

This first one describes in scientific terms the anthropological history of human empathy and how some of us have extended our compassion to other species and the planet.



The second one describes the psychological and social nature of different time zones and cities and how it affects our mentality and health.



Each is ten minutes long but will fly by because of the revolutionary way in which they are presented with visual and verbal information in an easy-to-absorb formula. A brilliant way to appeal to both verbal and visual learners simultaneously.

Do yourself a favor and watch them both. If you dig these half as much as I did, you'll be halfway to China.

Baloney Show Redux

After many years of people asking me to post video of my comedy shows, I finally managed to get one on the web. Go here to see clips from my full-length, elaborate, one-man comedy show which hasn't been performed in its entirety since '08 and will likely never be performed again – The Bizarro Baloney Show. This is the one I debuted in The New York International Fringe Festival in '02 and won "Best Solo Show" for. I also got a nice review in The New York Times, but, alas, nobody reads that shameless left-wing rag.

And the same folks that put up the comedy show clip have further demonstrated their twisted sense of reality by attempting to get me nominated for a Kennedy Center Honor. Yes, it's ridiculous, but the best things in life always are! Here's how you can help.

Gay Cowboys

Bizarro is brought to you today by Flamenco Segway.

Here's a fun little ditty about a topic I've discussed here before. Among groups known for being homophobic are "cowboy types," whatever that means exactly. I was raised in Oklahoma and Texas and can vouch for the accuracy of this stereotype. In fact, when I was a teenager in Tulsa, I was often accused by strangers of being gay simply because I did not dress like a local hick. (I leaned more toward the British punk rockers at the time.)

But viewed objectively, one can't argue that cowboy clothing is unusually feminine: pearl buttons, embroidered shirts (frequently of flowers), fringe, scarves, pants with the butt and crotch cut out (chaps), high heel boots with pointy toes (often with embossed flowers and swirls), big shiny belt buckles with more flowers and swirls on belts with yet more embossed flowers and swirls and dangling handguns (the ultimate phallic symbol), flamboyant hats that make Truman Capote's seem macho by comparison.

Perhaps getting in touch with my own feminine side, I wear a lot of western shirts, though not the rest of the garb. I'm a fan of fancy, vintage cowboy shirts and have a collection of about two dozen. As a matter of fact, I'd really love to get hold of one of those outlandish suits that country western performers used to wear at the Grand Ole Opry, but I'm not holding my breath. I can't afford a new one and finding an old one that fits and is in good shape is a long shot at best. It's not the sort of thing you come across on Craigslist.

It is a common belief that those who complain most about gays are most likely to be closeted gays themselves, just as those who champion family values are the most likely to be caught with an underage prostitute. Maybe Brokeback Mountain is more common than we know.

Brain Goo

Bizarro is brought to you today by Dubious Parades.

I remember visiting a museum years ago – can't remember which one or where, which is one of the problems of traveling a lot – wherein there was a display describing prehistoric surgery. For reals.

Apparently, somebody (anthropologists? archeologists? utility workers?) found ancient skeletons from cave man times that have pretty clear evidence that their skull had been cut into then sealed again while they were alive. I suppose scientific curiosity is a possible motive but that aside, I have to wonder what they were trying to cure. How aberrant can a caveman's behavior be that his friends decide they might be able to fix it by digging around in his head? If he was killing people for no reason, seems more logical that they'd just kill him. If he was hallucinating, they'd likely chalk it up to a spiritual experience. Same with epilepsy or whatever. Maybe he was the first person to start talking and they thought he was crazy. It's interesting that they even suspected that fiddling with the goo inside your head might change something about your life.

If anyone knows more about this, let me know. I don't have time to research it this week, I'm trying to get ahead on deadlines so I can take a little vacation. Even if you just have a theory, leave it in the comments. I find this kind of thing pretty fascinating.

Piraro Meets Larson

Bizarro is brought to you today by Sex, Violence, and Illegal Aliens.

Here is a completely true story that I don't believe I've ever mentioned in a public way before.

In 1981, I was 23 and working as a rookie ad designer for Neiman Marcus in Dallas, Tx. (Their headquarters, believe it or not.) I was drawing cartoons simply to entertain myself during downtime and my coworkers encouraged me to get them published. I hadn't seen a comics section of the newspaper in years and thought there was no place for anything more surreal than Marmaduke. But one of them brought in a cartoon from a newcomer, Gary Larson, called "The Far Side". I'd never seen his work before and was surprised that newspapers were, in fact, publishing the sort of cartoons that previously had only been seen in magazines. So I decided to submit my work.

I sent work to the 8 or 10 cartoon syndicates whose addresses I could find at the public library (NO INTERNET!!) and got encouraging responses, but no "takers". One day, I got a phone call from an editor at Chronicle Features in San Francisco, the same syndicate that gave Larson his start. He said he liked my work a lot but since they were selling Larson's work and it was only just then starting to catch on with editors, they didn't feel they had the resources to push another feature in the same category. But he wanted me to keep submitting new work so he could see how I was progressing.

We kept in touch and I sent in new work every month or so. A couple of years later, in 1984, I got a call from them saying that Larson had jumped to another syndicate and that now they had room for me. I was ecstatic. This began a several-month period of my submitting work, them editing it, giving suggestions, and generally grooming me for a daily gig.

During this grooming period, I happened to see an ad in the paper saying that Gary Larson would be appearing for a book signing at a local shopping mall bookstore. I was extremely shy with strangers back then, but decided to go meet him and see what he could tell me about the syndicate he had just left and I was about to join.

When I arrived, it was one of those small, narrow bookstores you see in the typical suburban mega-mall, and at the entrance of the shop was an average looking guy with round, wire frame glasses sitting by himself at a folding table with a stack of books. No one was speaking to him. I introduced myself by saying something like, "I'm Dan Piraro, I've been hired by (editor's name) to replace you at Chronicle Features." He smiled at this and said, "replace me, huh?"

He was a very nice, soft spoken, quiet sort of guy and he answered my questions about syndication. He vouched for Chronicle Features and their editors and said he'd had no complaints about them at all, but that he decided that now that his work was starting to gain some momentum, a bigger syndicate with a larger sales force seemed like a good business move. His words were something to the effect of, "I have no idea how long this is going to last so I figure I have to make as much as I can while I am able."

He fully expected his popularity to wane and wanted to make the most of it, which seemed logical at the time, neither of us knowing what an epic career lay ahead for him. I chatted with him for perhaps half an hour, during which time he signed and sold maybe three books. He hated that first book tour so much that I believe he never did another. I've sat at lonely tables in bookstores, too, and I don't blame him.

I saw Gary only once more, about ten years later, at the funeral of one of our mutual editors. Afterward, we smiled and reminisced about the bookstore meeting and it turned out the "replace you" line was what he remembered most. By this time, he lived in a huge, gated property outside Seattle with attack dogs roaming the grounds like Mr. Burns of "The Simpsons". I was still in a normal house in a normal neighborhood in Dallas, of course. I had a Papillon that roamed the yard from time to time, but it wasn't really the same.

I hadn't thought of that incident in years until it sprang into my head last night like a ninja from the past. Just thought you might enjoy it.

Smart Apes

Bizarro is brought to you today by Ebony and Ivory.

Is there nothing to see here? Really?

One might have thought that there was nothing much left of racism in America until recently. Racism is a very primitive impulse, at one time in our distant past, it was beneficial to distrust those not from your "tribe." And while most of us have evolved to see the foolishness in that kind of thinking in modern society, there are still plenty of us who operate from the primitive parts of our brains. This kind of grunting, chest-beating throwback to our hairier ancestors rises and falls throughout history and so I suspect that this current wave, too, shall pass. Let's hope no serious casualties result in the meantime.

I often wish that "intelligent design" were true, so that our species might behave more intelligently.

This cartoon has nothing to do with racism, of course, it's just been on my mind lately. Tomorrow, a funnier post.

Pea in Your Ear

Bizarro is brought to you today by the Technological Advances.

When I was growing up, I remember hearing people remark about how amazed really old people must feel. "Just imagine! They were born during horse and buggy days and now we've sent a man to the moon and can watch it live on TV! Such an amazing time to be alive!"

Yes, it is remarkable but I'm guessing old people born in 1910 probably got just as bored at seeing amazing new inventions every ten years as we do at seeing them every ten seconds.

When I was small, there were four channels on TV if you could get the antennae to work, there were about five computers in the whole country, each filling an entire room, and if you didn't already have the bust line you wanted, you just had to get over it because there was no such thing as a boob job. Cable TV didn't exist. Recording was something you could do to sound, but recording pictures off of TV was crazy talk. Movies were something you could watch on TV once a week on Saturday night, or at one of the three movie theaters in town, each playing only one film each. Phones had wires that connected to the wall and you couldn't even unplug them. If you didn't want to be disturbed by its ringing, you left it off the hook. Nobody but tobacco executives knew that cigarettes caused cancer. Typewriters sounded like machine guns and to correct a mistake you had to use white paint. Dark-skinned people used different water fountains and restrooms and no one batted an eye. If you wanted to cook something you had to use heat and wait half an hour – "microwave" was a word only astrophysicists recognized. Larry King was a middle-aged guy on the radio.

But today if you told me that I could stick something the size of a pea pod in my ear and hear the thoughts of any person from the past 10,000 years, alive or dead, just by thinking about them, I'd nod my head and say, "cool." Nothing surprises me except what we can't do. I'm still surprised an airplane is the fastest way to get from L.A. to N.Y.C. How quaint. When are they going to work the bugs out of that teleportation thing? Airplanes bore me, even with 42 channels of TV in the back of the seat. I can't surf the web on my laptop while we're in the air? What am I, Abraham Lincoln?

Perhaps I was born too soon.

Laws of Nature and Beyond

Bizarro is brought to you today by Better Living Through Force.

I haven't much to say about this GPS cartoon other than I hope everyone understood it. The idea was that the GPS led them to a cliff above their destination, then instructed them to drive off the edge. It seemed funny when I thought of it, but I'm not sure about the final result. I like GPSs but I don't like the voice. I prefer to just use the map part, like the one on my phone, and find my own way. I don't trust the robot voice to always know the best way.

At long last I am back in front of my computer where I belong. I went to Florida this past weekend with CHNW. I was hired to do a speech for a humanist group down there, the Center For Inquiry folks, and had a great time. Good people, smart questions, laughed a lot, took me to lunch after. What's not to like?

After the talk on Saturday, CHNW, her dad and I drove to an interesting little place called Ybor City where we hit some shops and had a beer. In old timey times there was a big cigar factory there where hundreds of people hand-rolled cigars all day. The tradition continues as there are cigar shops all over the place and a few people sitting in storefront windows rolling away. If you're into cigars, this is a real treat.

This pic at left was taken with my iPhone and I think it turned out pretty swell.

Even if you're not into cigars, it is strange to see so many smoke-friendly establishments within
the borders of our law-infested land. Smoking is so uniformly despised in the U.S., even outdoors, that walking down 7th Street in Ybor City feels more like Cuba than Florida. I often get chastised by friends and fans for smoking cigars, but I try to be considerate. I usually smoke at home and never smoke around crowds of any kind unless I'm walking quickly. I figure if my passing by with a cigar is enough to set someone off, they need more help than anti-smoking laws can give them.

Lots of things annoy me momentarily in public – bad music, mullets, cologne, confederate flags, cigarettes(they smell very different from cigars because they are crap tobacco and full of chemicals), people wearing fur, the smell of someone's fastfood, people who talk too loud on cell phones, defenders of Dick Cheney, the way everyone but me drives – but I just figure that's the price of leaving my house.

I cannot imagine a society in which we legislate against everything that briefly annoys someone. This encyclopedia of signs at a playground in Sarasota springs to mind. Looks like fun, doesn't it?